


I Won't Leave You Behind

by LittleDesertFlower



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F, Mermaids, Novella, POV Alternating, Supernatural Elements, soulsearching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-15
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-08-24 01:10:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 21,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16630031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleDesertFlower/pseuds/LittleDesertFlower
Summary: When the world is on the verge of apocalypse, the salvation of a few depends on a tiny lagoon in the middle of the Briggs Mountain Range. Problem is… this grail of hope is guarded by a mermaid who won’t give her lair up for the humans to use.





	1. Prologue: Legend Says

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Flower That Blooms In Adversity](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14812439) by [LittleDesertFlower](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleDesertFlower/pseuds/LittleDesertFlower). 



> This is an AU of my main FMAB fic, [The Flower That Blooms In Adversity](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14812439?view_full_work=true). I began writing this AU as a special celebrating the 100k words in Adversity, based on an idea that sparked from a few photo edits I was doing at the time, which eventually shaped this fic below.
> 
> I hope you'll enjoy it <3

“Once upon a time, there was civilization beneath the water. A world with shadows of sunlight that shone in its own splendor. A hidden world that humanity only caught a glimpse of very rarely, and when they did, it was not a good sign. For those who inhabited the waters of the Earth were not kindly creatures and did not spare human lives. Legend says these beings had been born of the union between sea and land, two mystical energies who one day arose to the wish to merge into one. The result of this was the merpeople.

Vengeful and proud, they wished to keep their kingdoms safe from human hands, never hesitating in harming them. At the very beginning, conceit was their reason for this, yet as years went by, killing a human equated to killing a horse mackerel. Their lives were disposable, and their flesh wasn’t hard at all to pierce. The merpeople began killing us for sport, spreading fear and inspiring the darkest of tales.

A very long time ago, an eternity past the birth of the merpeople, there lived a mermaid who, somehow, felt she didn’t belong. In appearance, she was one of them, no doubt. Long silky hair, a tail of star-lit scales, and a child of the sea. What set her apart was as intangible as the filtered sunbeams in the water, if you had looked upon her you wouldn’t have been able to distinguish her from her peers. But, deep in her heart, this mermaid was the most distant thing from them. She did not desire to bring harm to mankind.

Her difference was a secret she held very close to her chest, as if trying to hide it. For years and centuries and millennia, she hid well among her fellow merpeople, participating little and earning her reputation as a lone soul with a soulmate of the skies, perhaps. One day, when her superiors thought her ready, they gifted her with an heirloom of her family line. It was customary in their society to acquire a weapon to hunt once they entered a certain age, and she gladly took the sword her family had gifted her with. On her first day out in the open, a ship had sunk near the area she was supposed to be scouting, and she saw them. The humans. Their shapes were similar to her own, except they had long strong limbs in place of a tail. And she didn’t think them monstrous or ugly or even threatening. In fact, she thought them quite frail at first, and didn’t doubt for one second the quickness her people had to killing them.

When the time came, nevertheless, she failed in doing her duty, and she let them live. There was something unspoken in them that begged for mercy and for life. Something that spoke to her directly. She returned to her coven empty-handed. And that was the last day the mermaid swam in the merpeople’s kingdom.

A mermaid who refuses to kill the enemy is no mermaid, they told her. And she was banished from her birthplace and home to the place all traitors from their race go. A punishing environment of shallow proportions where the mystical energy in their blue veins eventually fades as they mellow away in size and soul. Without their power and immortality, any merperson would return to the original shape the world would have meant for them. They became fish, mere food for the humans, and their memories of the world of wonders they had been born in faded away. Legend says all fish we eat and catch in our nets were once inhabitants of the cities beneath the water.

She was sent there on her own, carrying the sword of her family as a reminder of what she had failed to do, and a curse was placed on the mortal world to one day lure the humans to her and tempt her to kill them. At first, her immense grief and confusion kept her from thinking of it, as did the pitiful width of the place of her punishment. No human stepped foot on the grounds she kept her eyes on for a long time during which all she had to entertain herself with were fish, remnants of her world, mute traitors that reminded her of what awaited her when her eternity passed. But man did eventually come to her lair, and while she didn’t kill the first ones, she refused to let them spot her and be a participant of such an ancient war.

For longer than you and I will ever live, the mermaid lay on the floor of her water prison, unmoving, undead and certainly not alive as her size decreased and her days grew thin . Until, one day, a man came armed to her banishment place, hungry and in need of fish to bring home—the first of many to come. The mermaid grew enraged and defended her own, traitors like her who once might have done what she was risking her life for. She lured the human in, only half of her body out of the water, and once she had both arms around his shoulders, the mermaid dragged him down to the bottom. She waited, thinking that perhaps this one act that had been asked of her a long time ago would bring her back, but the waters remained calm and teal, and the only change in them was the rotting body.

The bottom of her prison became, very soon, a cemetery. And yet the mermaid was never allowed to go back.

Legend says she is still here somewhere, pushing past the turnings of the clock and the curse that shrinks her for the one kill that will allow her to be returned to the merpeople.”

My father yawned and closed the book with great care so as not to damage the covers.

“Tell me the pretty one!” I said. “The pretty one with the other mermaid!”

I was barely a coherent kid at the time, a malleable brain my father liked to feed stories to. Most of them weren’t fairytales, but some were, and I enjoyed listening to them. Dark stories like the one I’d just heard only made me think and, eventually, made me sad.

“You’re not even going to ask me about this one, Zinnia?”

I crossed my arms tightly over my chest and pouted.

“No!”

“Well, it’s a very nice story, don’t you think?” He gave me a big smile to change my mind, but I was as stubborn as him and tired of the tales about evil mermaids.

“I want the pretty one,” I told him.

He sighed after a while, then got up to fetch me the anthology of fairytale that was approved by my mother for me to read.

“Which one’s the pretty one?” he asked, holding the book up for me to say.

I uncrossed my arms to point at the title whose letters I still couldn’t understand, because there was a mermaid under them. A mermaid with blood-red hair and a blue tail, and above all kind blue eyes.

He licked his fingers to turn the page and began reading.

This was one was adapted for children, a story of a mermaid who wished to leave the world under the sea because she had fallen in love with our civilization. She wanted to walk our earth and try our inventions, build fires in forests and dance in our balls. Out of desperation, she swam to a deserted beach, and she swam so far and crawled so deep into the sand that she grew legs under the sun. Legend says she never returned to the depths of the sea, and honestly, I don’t think she would have wanted to. Not back then, anyway.

The first tale, about a murderous creature who hadn’t always intended to be such, was soon a blur in my mind. But perhaps because I was young, or perhaps because I saw a little part of myself in the other mermaid, who wanted more than anything to be part of a world so different from her own, I would never forget this last story.

But, of course, tales with happy endings were never my father’s favorite, and he never told them more than once.


	2. A mermaid at the border

They told stories about the end of civilization. It wouldn’t come in balls of meteor fire or endless rain but barren lands and empty rivers. The crops would burn and water would dry, and humanity would slowly starve to death.

As a child, I cowered under the blanket late at night when my father whispered those words to me. I would dream about graying skies and ash falling from the clouds instead of rain, and wake up in tears until my father held me and comforted me at my most naive.

Lately, I _laugh_ at my naïveté.

I have seen many things on my way to the north of Amestris. I am not the only one migrating because of the famine. Rivers have run dry of life and the cattle have stopped reproducing at the rate we need to keep the population nourished. Even the crops are less abundant, and it is said that soon they will stop being enough.

All those stories are becoming our reality. And time is running out. Our country is at war with so many other nations at the moment that I doubt any of them would help, if they’re not suffering from the same problem already. This could be the war to end all wars—the war where death commandeers and there’s no way to elude it but run away.

I have been walking for months to get here. The north promised me hard-working people and huge stretches of land where new crops would thrive and the animals would breed. I even heard their rivers are still full of fish.

So far, there is snow and trees and plenty of mountains to get lost in. The nights might be cold—colder than I’m used to—but the season calls for it. I just want to see this place again in the spring. The season changes the landscape.

My heart skips a beat at the sight of three cows on the field next to the dirt path I’m on. I even stop on my way, leaving my walking stick behind, to pat one on the head.

“Where’s the rest of your herd, huh?” I mutter, mostly to myself. The cow is happy enough to let me pet it. I don’t know where the rest of them are, but three cows are still much better than none. My family business back in Central lived off of meat like this cow’s and eventually they didn’t have enough produce to sell when there were hundreds of people queuing to buy it. I don’t know what’s become of our butchery, I haven’t been there in a long time. But I’m glad this cow hasn’t landed its ass there, that means someone else here will get to eat its offspring.

Another one of the cows comes to sniff my hand, as if I had something to give them. Their ribs protrude a little, and it’s no wonder they’re looking for some treat. But I don’t have any, not even for myself, so I pick up my stick and keep going. I have a long way to go until I find some water to camp by, maybe I’ll even get some fish to fry at night. My mouth waters at the very thought of the smell of it.

Not too far away from there, I find it. It’s just a thin stream, probably where the cows are drinking from, but it should do. Where there’s running water, there’s drink and food. At least, there used to be.

I leave my heavy bag and my stick on the shore and wash my hands, try to spot movement in the water. It’s so clear it shouldn’t take long. But as minutes go by I realize there’s something wrong. No fish. Not one tiny fish in sight. Just pebbles and bubbles. I want to hit my head against one of the rocks. Of course, the cows would still need the water, but they’d have no need for the fish I so desperately hoped would be in it.

I take one long gulp of the water anyway, refill my reserves, and get going again. There should be someone around herding the animals, or waiting for them to come home to feeding time, and probably some town or something where I can ask for directions towards _more_ water.

Amestris is a country without ocean licking at our borders, so the only chance there is at trying the delicacies of fish is creeks and lakes. This is the notorious Briggs Range, tallest and coldest of the country, and natural border between us and Drachma, so it’s more likely that I find creeks here than it is to find a whole lake. All that snow has to go somewhere in the spring.

In any case, I decide to keep going until sundown, following the stream. If I find a town it’s possible I might end up sleeping on a nice real bed instead of the ground. I have followed so many creeks on my way here, creeks as devoid of fish as this one, and I have slept for so many nights on either grass or dirt that my back is used to it, but sometimes I still close my eyes and remember the comfort and luxury of a mattress. It’s been too many months now, I have become entirely nomad. But I would gladly cheat this life for a night.

Even if my reason for being here comes entirely out of necessity, I have to admit it’s beautiful. There’s such a lovely contrast between the colors of the yellowing grass and the reflection of the blue sky on the water with the peaks of the mountains in the distance, partly covered in snow, their rocky foundation still slightly visible even so. It’s a sight fit for a postcard, if I wasn’t on it.

Beauties like this make the journey worthwhile, and they distract me from the imminent kingdom come that I am so aptly running away from, as if that would stop it. The apocalypse is a persistence hunter, and probably a much better one that a human has ever been. We’re doomed to lose this, whatever it is. But I still fight. My father would call me stubborn as a mule at that—and he would be right.

Eventually, the river leads me to a town that’s so small every last part of it all belongs to the outskirts. How many people could live in this place? A hundred? Seventy people? There’s houses for about that many, and… resources, maybe. Nothing like what I saw only a few miles away, at North City. But, still, as I walk in I realize the place is too empty, yet it doesn’t look yet like it’s been abandoned.

When I get to what seems to be the main street, I find a small plump woman cleaning the steps to her own house. I approach her, heart beating fast at the sight that confirms that this town still houses people, to ask my questions and then some more if I can.

“Another lost sheep?” she says in surprise when she sees me coming. “They’re all up the mountain.”

“Ma’am,” I tell her. “I’m, er, looking for some source of water that still has fish?”

The woman glares at me, clearly tired of dealing with travelers that are on my same path. “Up the mountain, foreigner!”

“Thanks…” I mutter, mostly to myself. People are rude everywhere. Hunger does that. I don’t even wait to see her shake her head at me. There’s still a long way to go, if I’m going to follow her directions. This is the last village north, from the looks of it, but the mountains are still a little too far away for my taste. That’s where everyone must be, all on the lookout for food. It’s the modern way of hunting.

I leave the village behind to face nature. The border is somewhere out there, hiding between rock and snow, and maybe the last survivable place in the country. I’ve lived in the central plains, I’ve lived in the deserted south, and eventually everything rots and nothing prevails. I move because I have to, and because I have never found a place to settle. Having to search for food is the perfect excuse.

In this freedom, desperate and real, at least I get to see the world I would have never seen if I’d been born into a home that tugged at me. Exhaustion and hunger aside, I gladly let the mountains swallow me.

The path forks in several directions, west and east, but there’s still a less transited subsection travelling north in steeps and slopes. I take it this is the one the lady meant for me to walk through. Up ahead just the horizon awaits, and I couldn’t hope any harder that it brings what I’m looking for. To postpone the end of all things is always something I’ll root for, no matter how hard I have to walk and what I have to eat.

Anything is better than what things are already like in over half the country.

I can appreciate the loneliness of this, though. Everywhere I go I meet people on this same quest, and they huddle together, scared of being alone and losing their ways. Loud human beings who in their terror terrify _me_ instead. We will kill for one horse, a sheep, a chicken. I have seen women fight over milk for their children. No one ever said, in the tales I was told as a little girl, that the apocalypse would bring us together, but no one ever said either that it would destroy us from the inside as well as from the outside.

Walking alone at least grants me certain immunity. I don’t have to split rations or argue over who keeps watch. I sleep when I can, keep very little other than the strictly necessary, and I don’t have to stop for anybody except myself.

The mountains know that, and while they don’t rush me, they don’t make it easy for me either. The path that slithers around them is no railroad, surrounded by trees and swept by the cold winds of winter, but so far there is no snow falling and I won’t be risking getting lost any time soon. If there is running water, I will see it from up here.

It is already night, my feet barely dull lumps at the end of my legs, when I see it. The reflection of the last rays of sunlight, orange and purple, hit a solid surface about a mile or so away. Water… Water, at last. The last chance I have of finding sustenance on Amestris’ soil. Despite of how badly my muscles ache at this point, after over half a day’s worth of walking, I speed up my pace. I need to make it there tonight.

During that awfully long mile, I make my mouth water with the thought of my dinner and some patch of dirt to sleep in by the tiny little waves. I’ve been known to burn the most easily cooked things, but tonight I wouldn’t care if I burned half of my fish. I will have fish instead of dry meat and tree bark.

“Come on, come on…” I mumble on the last steep hill. I can already smell it, it’s there, right before me, and I just have to reach it. Finally. The trip is over.

But then I hear it. Not just waves, but a crowd.

I must be in the right place, yes, if everyone is here.

I haven’t dealt with a crowd in… too long. The last time must have been still back in the South Area, almost a lifetime ago. But now I have to.

_Think of the fish, just think of the fish…_ And I do. I haven’t come all this way to cower behind a tree, no matter how tempting the idea of waiting them out is.

My boots hit the gravel and announce my arrival to all those men shouting in direction to the water. The ripples are loud, but nowhere near as loud as my own heart, pumping hard.

Still, once I’m facing the lagoon, it’s entirely night and none of the many, many men gathered in the shores of it are paying attention to me. So I walk to them, careful not to step near the water. In this weather, getting wet can only worsen things.

Even though their wide backs block my view, I muddle my way through and ascertain for real that they _are_ fishing, or trying to. None of their rods are actually touching water, but they’re all paying close attention to the tiny waves and shouting.

I can’t make their words out at first.

They overlap, and they’re so different in intensity, so many utterances at once.

But they become clearer and clearer as seconds go by.

“You bitch!” some of them are saying. “Won’t you come around, huh? I’ll serve you on a silver platter and eat your fucking tail for dinner!”

Men like these only call one kind of person ‘bitch’. And if they’re not calling that to me, then who? A hiss answers me. A hiss that’s not of this world. A hiss beneath the water, creating the waves.

“There she is! There she is!” someone else says, pointing at the movement that’s coming nearer and nearer. Then, I see it—a tail, alright, a tail too big to belong to any fish that could exist in this lagoon. A tail in human size.

_It can’t be…_ But I still remember my father and all those tales he made me love, despite how predictable they were—are.

_…a mermaid._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I posted on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/fic_flower/status/1065561890242404353) the first edit I ever did of Olivier as a mermaid, long before this fic became a thing :D, in case anyone's interested. I'll be uploading a few more edits there in a few weeks, too.


	3. A monster fought by men

I push them out of the way on sheer instinct, just to see it closer. A mermaid, a real live mermaid. As elusive as a whale, only visible above water as she tends to hide beneath the darkness reflecting on it. Mythical and too real. Too real to be in human waters.

_It’s… impossible._

But I know what I saw. I know what made these ripples that now hit the shore.

I can’t help it, my feet drag forward.

And someone immediately grabs at my sleeve and pulls me back.

“Don’t come near the water,” a gruff voice warns me.

I turn to find a seven-foot-tall man with a Mohawk and a thin black braid. In the right light, with all this snow, anyone might confuse him for a bear on its back legs. His eyes are focused on the movements of the water, but his left hand doesn’t unwrap from around my arm.

“What?”

“The water,” he repeats. “She’ll get you.”

“Then what are you all doing here?”

“Waiting,” he says. Now he does look me in the eye, craning his neck down. “When she recedes, we can try and fish something.”

He inspects me slowly, as if he was surprised to find someone like me so far from civilization and wanted to tear the different layers off of my skin. I guess his questions before he gets a chance to ask them

“I’ll help you, then,” I tell him.

I get my arm back and begin to push my way out of the spot where water meets shore, where the sand is less humid, and leave the men behind to ogle the beast, but the bear follows me.

“Wait,” he says. “You can’t stay on your own.”

“Why not?”

“You’ll get killed if you’re not careful. Gather round with the men tonight.”

I eye him suspiciously. A woman _gathering round_ with the men. So alluring. But this one at least seems professional enough to just care about not getting me accidentally killed. Killed by what, I wonder. Can the mermaid leap out of the water? Or even survive out of it? That was never in any book I was read as a child. I’m starting to think I should’ve listened more attentively to my father’s stories, they might come in handy now.

I set up anyway, leave all I’d packed the last time near a rock where I’m sure the wind won’t move it, and rejoin them at the shore. Now, they merely watch the waves. There is nothing else that could call anyone’s attention. Wherever she is now, the mermaid doesn’t want anything to do with us.

The men talk among themselves, visibly more relaxed than before, used to this order of things.

The bear puts his hand—his only hand, I notice now—on someone else’s shoulder, a tall broad man with gray hair and brown skin.

“Time to make dinner, fellas,” the bear says. He looks like the leader, speaking louder than anyone and acting as if he had the only say in anything around here. He told me how I shouldn’t proceed to sleep, and since he’s the one from the two of us who knows how things work around here, I might as well listen. If anyone touches me, I won’t hesitate to slam my walking stick on their backs, though.

They all get their nets and fishing rods ready, so I run back for my own homemade fishing rod. It’s not the newest I’ve made but it is the best out of the few I’ve produced. The material isn’t hard to come by but I’m not good at sculpting wood or cutting string.

Nobody says a word as I join them.

And they should. Fishing this close to the last line of water is… practically useless. There’s not many fish worth catching that meander there. The biggest and hence more appetizing are where the water’s deep. But… as it turns out, that’s not the only thing that swims in there.

The waters are calm and the smell of the air does tease us, since we haven’t caught anything yet. Do they do this every night? Just… patiently wait for a dash of luck?

This lagoon isn’t an ocean, granted. But it’s big enough that we could get in, farther in, and get ourselves something heavy to dine on. It wouldn’t even take long to build a raft or something, to do so without getting wet.

I turn to the bear.

“There’s no fish here,” I tell him.

“We’ll get some out, don’t worry.”

But minutes pass, and the night gets darker. Even if there were any animals swimming by, we wouldn’t be able to see them for the lives of us. So I withdraw with a scoff and get my longer fishing rod out of my bag.

My heart pounds in my chest. What I’m going to do is the last thing I’d want to do if my goal was surviving. But I haven’t eaten in hours, I have walked farther than I’d meant to today, and I’m in the literal end of the world. I will die as well, if I don’t get my hands on some food soon. What difference do some days make?

I walk quickly over there, past them, and don’t even hear their complaints. If they want to wait on their asses forever, that’s fine with me. I won’t.

Some yell at me to get back when I splash my feet into the cold waters, my stride long and strong, confident only in appearance. I’m not looking forward to a tête-à-tête with a mythological creature.

But I wade deep enough until I’m covered up to my waist in dark water.

When something presses against my leg for one moment, I almost jump two feet high into the air, but the presence moves away soon and I exhale. _It’s just fishing, normal everyday fishing._ I haven’t been witness to anything out of place, this is just … another shared camping site in a really inaccessible place, and I’ll be out of here in the morning to find another source of water. I can’t stay here, but tonight it’s sort of mandatory that I do, anyway. I might as well do it nicely.

“Are you fucking crazy?” someone screams. “She’ll maul you! Get the hell back now!”

I shiver from the cold. This definitely isn’t my most lucid idea.

I don’t have to wait much longer. Soon enough, something tugs at my rod, and I tug back at it, testing the weight of the animal on the other side, and content myself with it not being too heavy. It’s not bad for a first catch—an only catch. If someone had walked here with me, I might use them to bring the game back to shore. Now I’ll have to get back there and return here, wasting time.

The fish fights me, wailing once I make it leave the water, splashing me all over. But it’s a fool, aside from dead, if it thinks I won’t fight harder. No one beats me at stubbornness.

Once it’s out of the water, I deem it to be about the size of my forearm, and I squeeze my nails into its gills until it dies, slippery, in my hands. This will do… for now. I might keep this one to myself, as a trophy, and fish a few more for the men. The thought of not sharing would be tempting, but I’m not an asshole.

Something slaps against my legs again, and this time I don’t pay attention to it. I tell myself it’s just local fauna, convince myself of it even if my body is reacting to it differently. It screams at me to be smarter than my brain, and I ignore it, because it’s in my best interest to.

That is… until the water ripples around me in a way that is nowhere near natural, and I turn around slowly to see that tail that’s the color of translucent teal. When I try to run the hell away from there, because I sure as fuck did not plan to die today in freezing water, no limb in my body responds. I will them to and they all ignore me, as if suddenly my nervous system was refusing to carry the orders my brain is giving. I feel my lungs take air in shallowly, trying not to make noise. The little waves crash against my waist. They pinpoint my position. They paint a target around me.

I remember the stories, the deaths and the blood mixing up in the blue waters. I don’t want mine to nourish a beast. I need to get out of here.

_Please don’t eat me, please just don’t eat me… I just wanted some fish._

The tail comes back up a few times, making little waves of its own, but I can’t see anything else. I feel it, though. A presence of something… not evil, not entirely, but maybe just… dangerous. Potentially dangerous. Wrapped up in mystery and history. Ancient history.

All I can think about is my stupidity. My arrogance. Why did I think I could get in here and not get mauled? Why would I be any different? I can’t breathe, every time I open my mouth to I just can’t. My heart beats slowly in my chest—it pounds. Back on the shore, the men yell. I wish my body would listen to them and I could return. I just want to be back on land, to run away, so fucking far away no one would ever think of finding me again.

But minutes go by, and the mermaid leaves me intact where she’s found me.

“Thank you…” I whisper. _Thank you for my life._

She’s spared me. Why would she spare me? She looked about ready to kill all those men at the shore, earlier. Why not me? What sets me apart? I practically made myself available as food, I served it directly into her lair. If she wanted vengeance, or just dinner, she would have had it easy.

My legs shake and I can’t even hold my own weight in the water, thank god it keeps me upright anyway. The yells have quietened down, and I figure it’s about time I headed back.

I mostly just swim the few feet between me and safety—full, real safety, a dry patch of sand to finally breathe in—and end up getting wet all over. But I don’t loosen my grip on the fish or the equipment. I’ll be damned if aside from my decency this place strips me of the only thing that can keep me alive.

The bear catches my arm when I’m stumbling back to shore. I’m the perfect height for him to.

“What the hell was that back there?” he roars.

“I have a fish,” I mutter.

“You also almost don’t _have a head_ ,” he says, but he’s gentle when he pulls at me to get me back on the sand.

The men circle me, jaws dropped as if they’d seen a ghost. I hear the rippling again and turn just in time to see a blonde head sink back into the waves. _There they have their ghost._ I didn’t know mermaids could be blonde. In my head, when I listened to the stories, I kind of always pictured them as dark-haired creatures, anthropomorphic except for their humongous size, not so… closely resembling the statues we have of heroines. Not so bathed in light, either. I expected something much, much darker. Something that wouldn’t have hesitated to claw me dead.

“D’you have any warm spare clothes?” the bear tells me once I’m safe.

I look down as I give him the fish. “… no.”

I have a change of clothes, but mostly it’s just underwear and basic dress. This wet excuse of a jacket is my only one. It was supposed to last me the winter, but now I highly doubt it will survive tonight.

“Hey!” he yells, turning back for a second. “Anybody got a coat?”

“I do. Wait,” says a young man, almost still a boy, and immediately goes look for one in their collective pile of things.

The bear looks back at me, quirking an eyebrow.

He offers me a hand to shake. I do, reluctantly. His hand is big enough to hold _my head_ instead of my own hand.

“Name’s Buccaneer,” he says. “You’re the only one that’s been brave enough or stupid enough to get in there in years. None of these fuckers gave you three seconds, but you’ve made it back. With food. We need to know how you did it.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“You’re alive. She’s let you live. Why?”

“I don’t know.”

And I don’t. Am I really the first to survive getting into that lagoon? How many men died in order for them to figure out touching that water wasn’t a good plan? A voice in my head wants to believe this has been a mistake. Another voice is just plain grateful I didn’t die a gruesome death in front of literal strangers.

“Look, kid,” Buccaneer says, “she’s killed every single one that came before you. Or d’you think you’re the first to judge us for fishing on shore?”

I gulp. Maybe I shouldn’t have come to those conclusions so lightly. Especially knowing there was something in there that could attack at any moment. My head’s dizzy from the long hours of fast and the shock, and I choose to blame that instead of blaming my pride.

“We need to know why she let you go. You could be our salvation.” He sighs. “Or at least speed things up a little.”

I look back at the water as the young man brings me his spare coat. I mumble a thank you and change into it. There’s fish in there, there’s sustenance and there should be plenty to get going for some time. There’s also one mermaid. And I might just be able to swim in there once more and not get killed. And this Buccaneer thinks it’s an actual plan that can work.

This is why the country won’t ever prosper. Sure, the situation’s bad, but the people who could do something about it choose to do something loosely useful instead.

“Come eat with us,” Buccaneer grumbles. “We’ll catch you up.” 

* * *

 

We manage to get a small fire started, enough to roast a few fish for dinner and warm ourselves up. I hang my clothes in a slapdash excuse of a branch while I listen to them begin to settle in for the night. They’re not scared anymore, or at least they’re nowhere as scared as I am. Is this the kind of thing you get used to with time?

I’m the stranger tonight, although they’re all new faces to me too, so I’m not really sure how welcome I am. Their eyes might fix on me as if I’d walked on water, but no one tries to get me to talk until I’ve sat down near where they are, sporting an old coat that smells like _not me_ and that I admit is enough of a courtesy. If it’d been me watching an idiot newcomer get all wet, you can bet my coat would have stayed well stored somewhere.

Buccaneer points at the fish with his huge head, then looks at me.

_You fished, you get to eat._

But, unfortunately, this is a binding contract, I realize now. And how hilarious that is. I came here looking precisely for what I’ve found—a small lagoon of life. Have I also found some … extra things in the way? I’ll just have to deal. I’m not the only hungry mouth here, but I’m a mouth that may also be more than just that. And they want that. They need it.

I’m really going to have to go back to Central one of these days just to find my dad and tell this to him. A mermaid, a live one, terrorizing a bunch of bear-like men at the end of the world. He could write books about that if he heard the story being told properly. Good words are always born out of better words and a lot of glue to make something solid out of all of them. Writing is a puzzle, and my father was very good at solving riddles and anything that required little pieces. That man would have found his way with a half-shredded map and candlelight in the middle of a blizzard.

I would like to say I’m like him, but to be honest I’m not a writer nor a leader. I’m not even that good at finding my way. I don’t even know what _is_ my way.

In honor of Buccaneer’s advice, I quietly lean in and get myself some dull-looking white fish. At first, I only pay half a mind to the fire, the water, and the voices of these people who act like a family. How strange, to find such a thing in the middle of nowhere. One would have thought they’d fight over the resources, starting a new war, but they’ve gathered to defeat something that makes a much tougher enemy than any of them. Hard as that may look at first.

Soon, though, I’m swept right in as if I was a long-lost sister of all these people. Just because I walked into a lagoon of death and made it back.

“So, what leads you here?” Buccaneer asks me after a while.

He has that thirst in his stance. Not a storyteller’s, but maybe a journalist’s. Someone avid for stories, for the threads that interweave in order to create one.

I am very much aware right now of how little and poor of a writer I am. And an even poorer speaker. Why am I here? Simple. It wouldn’t last more than two sentences. It’s not a satisfying story.

I take a bite of my fish to avoid answering.

“Come on,” he says, chuckling. “Nobody crosses the country for pleasure.”

“I’m not. I just wanted to find a place like this.”

They all laugh.

“Mermaid included?”

Somehow, that makes the laughter reverberate. It’s not like they’re here vacationing too, sunbathing in the winter sun. We’re all where we are because there’s little else to do than stay where there’s still trees and animals. The south’s barren, Ishval’s ash, and Central’s evergreen patches of grass are starting to yellow.

“Why haven’t you tried to kill her?”

Buccaneer almost rolls on the ground, apparently because what I’ve said is a new level of hilarity.

“I did once,” he says once he’s composed himself a decent amount. “When she fucking sliced my arm with a sword, I rethought things.”

“A sword?”

“A sword. Taller than you, by the way.”

“How’d you survive, then? A severed arm is—”

“Luck,” they all say, and Buccaneer nods.

But then he adds: “And precaution. No one nears the water, and if they do, they do so at night to fish. She sleeps, or rests, at night. It’s safer, then.”

My questions are machine-gun ammo.

“Have you thought to sail closer to where the fish are?”

“She would sink us, then eat us, and then who provides?”

“Call the military.”

Then, I notice a man next to Buccaneer sit uncomfortable on his log. White hair, dark skin… and when he opens his eyes and looks at me, I know the reason for his being upset at my suggestion. Ishvalan.

“They’re too busy fighting wars outside our borders,” he says, slowly, calmly, as if none of this had anything to do with him when it probably involves him the most. “If they came here, they would put most of us behind bars coming into this country illegal because our lands are barren.” For the first time in a while, I pay attention to the people around me, to their faces and their hunched shoulders. I see names of distant warring countries in their tired eyes and the corner of their dry lips. How far they have come, for a chance at living. They might have risked more than I have. “And the problem would still be there in the morning. They’d be no match for her.”

“No one _is_ ,” Buccaneer adds.

Her, the monster in those waters. The creature who stands between us and survival.

“Anything you’ve thought of, we’ve done,” Buccaneer continues. “I lost my arm doing the same thing you did. I make sure nobody else loses anything. But you… you got in there and yet you’re intact.”

He leans closer to inspect me well.

“It’s not so much the ‘why’ that bugs me… but whether you’ll stay and put that to use.”

“Who says she’ll spare me again?”

Buccaneer and the others look at each other as if sharing life secrets I’m not privy to.

“You spent _minutes_ in there,” he says. “She could have killed you tenfold in that span of time. She hasn’t. She’s not going to.”

He sighs.

“We’ve seen men fall over the years… You don’t have to believe it yet, but you’d do well in respecting it. And…” He looks me in the eye. “Honoring it.”

And the truth is… I don’t really have anywhere else to go. Rules won’t bother me.


	4. A ship of dreams

*

It bothers her, the noise. She’s not used to it.

They came in hoards and she let them live, then they came with harpoons and nets and they bared their teeth at her, so she killed them. What should have freed her from this pitiful lagoon only made them arrive in bigger numbers. And, she has found, the humans don’t know how to keep quiet and respect the flow of the water and the earth.

_They are just as they were always depicted to me…_ Brutish and loud and an aberration of nature, decimating the population of fish day after day, roasting them in fire. She could never bear to look at them when they did it. She couldn’t bear to observe them for long. Once, a very long time ago, she might have harbored pity for them, for the race her own wanted dead and gone. But, now at the end of each and every day, she only wished for them to leave. Now, they didn’t come near the water if they could help it. They had slowly earned their lesson. if they crossed the line and entered her lair, they already knew she wouldn’t let them live, so they murdered the eldest and most worn of her kin in cold blood and ate them, their memories spilling over sand—the saddest death, for a merperson.

No human approached the waves, so she’d taken to watch them a little bit closer. One day she might as well just leap from the depths and claw at them, bring them down with her. Maybe, if she did, the sky would part and the downpour would drag her back into the ocean where it had been millennia since she’d belonged.

But today… a human walked in. A human who didn’t smell like human. Small and thin and barely a spec of brown in the sea of blues and grays. The mermaid had swam closer at once to make her last kill. But she’d stepped down at the very last second, when she was already coiling herself around the human to pull her down.

Oh, how easily a human would drown even if they stood close to the shore.

The mermaid had paused on her way, for the first time in too long. Her heart, tormented by grief and loneliness, had momentarily forgotten about the many years that it had borne the weight of life.

There is something in the human… something without a name, a song that the wind could sing much more accurately than the mermaid herself ever could hope to. Something that stands at the line between realities, that coexists among gods and mortals alike.

_History…_ the mermaid thinks to herself now.

If she had had any voice underwater, she would have petted the backs of the ancient fish that roamed their common prison and told them… told them in whispers how history herself had just walked into her lair, and she’d had to let the human live if only to find out exactly how much of it she bore within her, and whether she carried past and future alike.

*

 

I walk in the water a second time, then a third, then a fourth and a fifth. And after a couple of days, I handle the fishing while the men look for food elsewhere. She hasn’t killed me yet. I felt her, there, underwater, swimming closer and somehow… observing me the same way I was pretending not to observe her. But she never touched me, and I never tried to touch _her._ I wouldn’t stand a chance against her speed and stamina, she would just drown me the same way snakes choke their prey. And I’m not even sure if mermaids can even die.

Nobody changes anything around here, though. At night, we take shelter in the sand, and during the day we collect bark and berries and snow to boil for water, because no one aside from me dares me step into the lagoon, and I won’t be doing laundry for everyone on this shore while they chill in the sun.

I could get used to this, if it weren’t because getting wet every time I want to fish isn’t very cost-effective. There has to be another way to do it. If the beast won’t drag me down to the bottom of the lagoon, then I need to plan something that works. I don’t want to invade her lair, but I can’t stand the stupidity of fishing just a few feet into the water when much bigger animals might live in the depths.

When night falls, we gather by the fire and we cook and tell stories. Buccaneer tells the best ones, about wars and monsters and pariahs, and also about his arm. I’ve heard about fifty different versions of how he lost it, and I know only one of them is true—even if it seems the least likely—but he makes us believe in his story anyway. I wish I had that commanding power with words. In times like this, the ability to bring new tales into life is just as important as preserving that life. It makes all the difference between surviving and living. Stories give us _hope._

He always sits by Miles, a man escaping the government and the deserted Ishval where he was born, who keeps to himself and only ever smiles when Buccaneer jokes about something. Perhaps I was wrong to think the apocalypse was recent, perhaps it was brought upon us earlier, by our very selves, and at a higher price than anticipated. This man is a runaway from war who just keeps walking into new ones.

The man who lent me his coat is named Austin, and he’s younger than I am. A boy that back where I used to live would be a messenger or a clerk somewhere, yet here he does what everyone else: skin rabbits and dust the sand off of our sleeping mats and clothes.

They are a family already, a peculiar one but one all the same, and I’m a newcomer. I refuse to settle, I left my own home because of this. I hate for things to get stagnant as they do when the men get used to my presence and my role in their community. I need motion, action, change, or I seek it elsewhere. Ever since the shortage of food, my options are severely limited, but that doesn’t mean I don’t wish for them.

“Hoping you fish her out of there on sheer will?” Buccaneer chuckles one day when he catches me gazing at the waves under the light of the sunset.

“I was just…” I sigh. “Thinking of how to cross it.”

“It’s safer on foot, you know? And there’s not really that much on the other end, or we would’ve set another camp there.”

“Still, I’m getting tired of ‘safe’.”

He makes a face at me.

“‘Safe’ is what keeps us—”

“Alive,” I say before he gets a chance to. “Yeah, you mentioned that a couple of times. But I can’t spend hours in there every day, coming and going. I need to find a more suitable option.”

He pats my shoulder sympathetically, yet still doesn’t offer any solutions himself. It’s all black or white, survival or death. Me getting in there for food or leaving.

“That’ll change in the summer.”

“I’m not waiting till summer…” I say between my teeth as he walks away, humming a song to himself.

_If not on foot, then how do I cross this thing?_

And the answer comes in the shape of wood.

 

I lose track of who is here and who isn’t. Sometimes I call for Miles, because he’s the best at spotting the kind of trees I’m after, and I realize he’s not here because Buccaneer brought him along with him. They fluctuate between here and the village, to bring them fish sometimes or bring cow milk up here. I watch them go down the mountain as I walk up the path, arms aching from carrying tree trunks.

My side of the shore has inevitably grown larger, the men sleeping further and further away every night. It’s clogged with wood and supple lines of reed. One of these days I’ll figure out how to put it together into something that floats. The men judge from their distance, content with their life as it is, not really looking for something else.

It’s not that I want something else. I just want less weight on my shoulders, and to… to get a glimpse of what it’s like. From the shore, from inside the water, what I see should scare me to pieces. There’s nothing but dark greenish blue and a presence that gets closer and closer until it scurries away before my very eyes. If I board on this project of mine, if I can get it to sail, even for just a few yards, I’ll see things differently and maybe I will understand what exactly is in this lagoon and why it’s here.

It… calls me, the moving water. Like I’m destined to be there. If I’m to choose whether that happens dead or alive, I’d really prefer to go for alive. Atop a raft. To bring food to these idiots and live on a little longer.

_She won’t kill you…_ She won’t, and I know it.

She’s had plenty of chances to.

Perhaps I want to go back in there because I want her to try again. I need to see her.

Yeah… I need to see her. Atop my boat, safe and sound. But she’s not part of an exhibition, and I’m not in a museum I paid to see. This is the wild, and there’s men in here who have lost limbs.

Men who don’t like that I’m innovating. No one knows how long this mermaid truce will last, or if she’ll ever rise to end me. But it’s all we have.

No one wants to cross the border into Drachma, into war, either.

This, at least, however dark and dangerous it might be, is the life they know and more or less have certain control over.

A war is plain old chaos you walk into without knowing in what state you’ll walk out—or if you’ll ever walk out.

There’s something out there… Something that feels even more life-wrecking than war, and not in the good sense. It pulses beneath the waves. It’s… ancient. Older than words. And anything that precedes those is both terrifyingly long-lived and more proper of a nightmare than real life.

Why here? Why my country? Why did I get thrown into the mix?

Why not go on?, I ask myself as I cut wood and tie planks together. Why didn’t I look at the mess here and keep walking? Anyone in their right mind would have. Originally, I thought I would.

I’ve stayed for nothing. And I’m doing this for nothing. Just a hunch, and memories of old stories.

No one else here cares about stories. They might have heard them, the same way that I have. But… they see danger and adapt to it, they draw lines on maps to find more trees, to find more rabbits or a rare stray deer. Their pragmatism surprises me because in the end it’s illogical, just like my own behavior.

Moving on, trying our lucks somewhere else, that would make more sense.

The light of the sunset hits my eyes as I work today, but I can’t look away from it for too long. It loses itself in the water. No ripples today. Not even a gust of wind to make it move. And nothing breaches its surface. I’m expected to go in soon, to follow these men’s tradition, but for now I content myself with watching.

Always watching, always remembering.

_A mermaid who refuses to kill the enemy is no mermaid…_

I’ve heard so many stories where they’re the enemy. A race that fights over the oceans and the land that’s worthless to them, because we humans are a pest to the planet. So many few tales tell a different story. So very, very few. I remember one from my youth. One, among the hundreds of depictions in paintings and novels and speculative nonfiction.

“If you’re all like that,” I mutter to myself, to the shadow of a mermaid, “then why aren’t I in the bottom of that lagoon?”

“Talking to someone?” Buccaneer says. His voice has long ago ceased to frighten me, even when it comes from behind me.

I turn to look him in the eye and find that he’s grabbed his bag and his thicker coat.

“You too?”

He looks down at my little crafts project, as he’s taken to calling it.

“Any progress?”

“Nope.”

“I’d just… get a really thick tree, carve myself a seat in the middle, and off you go.”

“I’m nowhere near as strong to cut down that kind of tree.”

“Still,” he says, sighing. “You’re a real lifesaver, kid. If that works, we’re gonna be eating like kings. Keep it up, you’ll eventually come up with something.”

I nod, and he walks away, satisfied with my silent thanks. For a man of many words, he doesn’t seem to need many from people to understand them.

My curiosity is stronger than myself as I study him.

 “Where are you even going, Buc?” I tell him, already laughing. Wherever the hell he’s meant to arrive at, it’s surely going to come as a surprise for me. I wouldn’t even dare picture him anywhere that’s not here, in this mountain, by this lagoon, with these men that are his army, even if he refuses to call it so. He’s been leaving lately, but he never says where, and I might as well follow my curiosity down the rabbit hole—because he will love to tell me about it.

“Home, to the wife!”       

“You have a wife???”

Buccaneer chuckles, and I don’t even bother to ask him anything else, he’s gone before I notice.

 

*

It gets quiet out there. Dawn comes and the shore is bare, except for one tiny brown spot surrounded by dead trees.

_What are you doing?_ the mermaid wonders. What could a human do, on her own, in a hostile environment? She’s seen men survive on this corner of the Briggs Range for enough time to know a group pulls through more easily than one individual. The last time she remembers a sole man there, he was bleeding from his shoulder socket, and she’d tasted human flesh. Another careless kill that hadn’t gotten her back home.

Perhaps… this one woman would be her ticket out of her, back to the lands she knew, back to society. She would kill, now, if she were allowed to return. After all, her old principles had died the day the first human had.

Perhaps she could do it now, she could jump elegantly, breach the surface, and maul that tiny human creature. She could do it, and she told herself to, but she never did. And she’s had days to ponder the decision.

It just never comes to her as a resolution.

Not when the human finishes her boat and pushes it onto the water.

Not when she climbs aboard it, fishing rod in hand, and sails forward.

Not even when she is floating in the middle of the mermaid’s lair, alone and vulnerable.

The mermaid doesn’t kill her. The mermaid swims up to watch her.

Such a lovely little beast, so fragile, so small. Yet…

There it is, again, the flash of something greater that the mermaid doesn’t understand.

_Who are you?_ she wonders. _Who are you? Why are you here?_

And there is only one way to find out. She emerges from the water in silence. She wades forward, looking at the human whose back is turned to her, and she knows she doesn’t have it in her to do anything. She hasn’t been able to do anything in too long, far too long, cursed with sight but never interaction.

Then the human leans on the back of the boat to grab something, and she sees the mermaid. And the mermaid doesn’t sink back into the depths, but the human does reach out for air to climb with a small gasp.

The mermaid swims closer.

_Who are you?_

The human stares, holding her breath.

_I won’t hurt you,_ the mermaid thought. _I can’t hurt you, you’re…_

She looks up at the human, blue against brown, and that ‘something’ she’d noticed before lay perfectly clear in the human’s eyes. History—past, present, future.

*

 

She just stays there, like a statue, and I don’t dare move. I don’t dare breathe.

Something calls me from within the mermaid’s eyes.

_Who are you?_ I want to ask. A question that hides so much more than just curiosity for her, it hides the uncertainty that I’ve always lived with: _Who am_ I _?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Earlier this summer I made a little [edit](https://twitter.com/fic_flower/status/1070685790454407168) of Olivier as The Little Mermaid, and I imagined her face would be so happy because she was seeing Zinnia up close for the first time ^^ (I also may or may not have imagined her singing a reprise of Part of Your World)


	5. A human and a mermaid

“What do you seek?”

Her voice hits me like a bolt of lightning. I didn’t know mermaids had a voice, or could speak the way we did. Sounds don’t carry the same way underwater. But this one would be resonance to a cataclysmic event even in the deepest of seas.

And the question… _What do I seek?_ What does she seek in me? Why hasn’t she killed me yet? I’m easy food.

“I’m not… seeking anything.” Not in the literal sense of the word. To seek… is such a strong verb. I don’t seek, I just _look for_ things. Food, a home, a proper life. I’m not on some grand quest, I’m not the hero of some story. Even my own story isn’t one I’d like to tell. I don’t do anything worth sharing with the world. I’m nothing special. A human caught up in a nightmare old as civilization yet daring to probe deeper into it.

“Then why venture where no one else does?” she asks me in that voice that could brew storms as well as make them dilute themselves back into the air. “Is it death, perhaps, that you’re chasing?”

“Life. I’m chasing life,” I tell her. “Food. Do you eat, down there?”

“Don’t you know?” she says. Her blonde hair floats underwater, as if the wind was moving it. Hair never looks wet when inside the water.

“Then I must imagine you’re very hungry,” I say. Because I’ve had plenty of time to imagine the answer to her question. What she does with the men she kills… is what I do with the fish I kill. “Go ahead. I won’t fight you. There’s no one here to pull me from the depths if you take me.”

She pauses for a moment. And I don’t dare fear that she’s really thinking about it. She won’t call my bluff. She would have already.

“So I’ve noticed.”

I look at her. She feels so human, even if she isn’t. At plain sight, I wouldn’t think to be afraid of her. At first glance, she’s just a woman, alone and swimming. But when I lean in to fix my eyes on her, I feel something in me surging forward, something that wants to drown in them. Those are not the eyes of a mortal. They are the ultimate reflection of the life of an extraordinarily ancient creature. What she has seen… what she has done, that is a proper story.

And it’s so familiar to me.

“Do you know what you are killing?” she asks.

“Fish.”

“They weren’t always fish.”

“Those men you gorge on weren’t always dead, either.”

 

*

“It’s in my nature,” the mermaid says. It never was. It was supposed to be. And then it became a habit, never a trait of character. A necessity, even. Sometimes, the mermaid feels as if every last man on this earth is being sent her way, to tempt her, to force her to do her duty. Maybe, then, her crimes will be forgiven. If there’s still someone out there who can forgive them. “To kill.”

“Then kill,” the human taunts her. “Like I said, I won’t stop you.”

“No,” the mermaid says, curiously. She herself doesn’t understand why, she doesn’t presume ever to, but it’s there, clear as day, mysterious as the ashes mingling with the sand at the bottom of the lagoon.

“And them? Why do you kill them?”

_They’re not you,_ the mermaid thinks. _They are other. You aren’t._

“Life,” she answers cryptically, in the words of the human. “Fate. Justice.”

“Will you kill me if I come back with a harpoon?”

“No,” the mermaid answers truthfully. Something compels her to. She would not, even if it meant paying with her life. It wouldn’t be much of a payment, after all. A wasted, thin life couldn’t be worth much. It had been stretched so far in the last centuries, it meant little to her.

“Because I should,” the human mutters, and the mermaid is surprised to see her biting her lower lip. “I really should. I stand for my race, too.”

“Then go ahead,” the mermaid says before beginning not submerge herself back into the dark teal waters. “I won’t stop you.”

*

But… I never do. Killing might be in her nature, it was never in mine.

 

I come back, when the camp is empty because the men have gone relieve their bladders down the hill. The boat becomes my boat in those scant moments when I’m off fishing duty. Everything is quiet but I can hear her come, over the tiny sounds of the waves hitting wood and the trees jostling in the distance. It’s a pulse, something that doesn’t hurt the ear but still startles me a little every time.

Sometimes she doesn’t speak, she just floats there, watching me watch her. I often wonder about what she sees. What is a human lifespan to her, I wonder. And does she see that youth in my face as clearly as I see her magnificence in hers?

“What do you do?” she asks me one day.

At the moment, I’m basically just sitting on deck and watching the sky. The second I hear the men coming back, I’ll pretend I was prepping the bait.

Her arms are on top of the boat, dripping water. She can stay there for minutes at a time, and she doesn’t recoil when I come closer, nor I when she occupies that space. I trust her word, and slowly I lose any fear of drowning. I lose fear of her, while that only makes my companions more wary.

“I’m just here,” I tell her.

“No,” she says, “What do you do, as a human?”

“Oh.” I can’t say I was ready for that question. “Well, we pretty much just… exist?”

“Your existence is so frail, how can that ever be enough?”

“How… how much longer do your kind live?”

“Thousands upon thousands of years.”

“A human lifespan is… not even a tenth of that.”

“How can it ever be enough?” she asks again, sounding a little less calm.

I think about it. “It isn’t. Life isn’t enough, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make the most out of it.”

“How?”

“Depends.”

“How do _you_ make the most out of it?”

_I risk death and come see you every day although I don’t know you._ But… sometimes it feels like I do, like some part of me and some part of her were born out of the same stardust.

“I… think of stories.”

“What kind of stories?”

“The kind of stories that live on, I guess.”

She smiles. “I see, you seek immortality through story-telling.”

“I seek…” I meet her eyes, blue like nothing else, and old like this earth I walk on and she swims in. “What’s the opposite of oblivion?”

“There is not one.”

“I seek… leaving something behind. What do _you_ seek?”

“Miles and miles of ocean,” she tells me, almost singing it, almost missing it right in front of me. It feels as if she was committing treason by doing so. This is not meant for human ears, so mortal, so short-lived. We’d never know what to do with the information. We’d never find the words to describe it. “A home, not a prison.”

“Why?” I ask. “Is this a prison to you? Did someone put you here?”

It is only now occurring to me that a mermaid can’t have been born alone in a lagoon where she’s the only inhabitant. What happened to the others? Or, rather, what happened to _her_?

She splashes me accidentally when she removes her arms from my boat and gets them back into the water.

“Someone’s coming,” she tells me, and I look behind me to see who it is. When I turn back around to say something back to her, she’s already gone.

But my questions haven’t gone anywhere. And I still want to know the answers to them.

And there is only one man standing who might have them.

Buccaneer is a simple man of simple tastes. He likes stories, burned fish, and being loud. He returned not that long ago from his trip down the mountain, back into the valley that saw him being born, and as he used to do before coming back, if I want to find him I’ll certainly succeed if I go look for him in either a gathering of men, easting by the fire, or laughing somewhere.

If you look at him, you might even believe the world isn’t about to end. He’s a soul that would have belonged in older times.

I tie my boat to the nearest tree, away from the little camp where everybody sleeps, so no one will trip on the cord, and make sure it’s secure before heading to Buccaneer.

He’s settling back in, getting his things out of his travelling bag and smoothing out his mat. Some of us sleep in the sand, but he says it’s coarse enough to make him itch all night, and no one wants to hear him complain for hours when it’s time to get some shut-eye.

I sit with him, and I know he’ll like the company. He always does.

“What do you know about mermaids? Story-wise, I mean.” Someone has to have some basic information on the oral tradition in this world. It’s like the stories about vampires, they’re always either about the darkness of the monster or the human attraction to them. I want to know what the cliché is for mermaids. I have my own memories to draw from, but still… I’m no expert, my dad just read me a lot of stories.

“Why are you asking about them?” he chuckles.

“No reason.” A pretty important one, with a tail and diamond eyes. Who I can’t speak about to these men because they might spend a few nights screaming at me for my lack of self-preservation, and more importantly, _their_ self-preservation.

He raises an eyebrow at me.

“I’m curious and with a lot of time to kill.” And that’s how I know I’m getting warmer. He is a curious man himself, he understands this aching that I get sometimes for things that at first glance don’t seem to make much sense.

“Then do something productive,” he says, trying to blow me off because he knows the topic is delicate, in some way. Not to me, not anymore. Maybe I’ve grown complacent, but this mermaid of ours doesn’t terrify anymore. She… entrances me, she entices curiosity in me about the mystery that surrounds her. “Some more of the men are coming back from town, we’ll need food.”

I smile a big stupid smile to win him over. “How’s the wife?”

Buccaneer guffaws loudly enough to make ripples on the surface of the water if he was facing it in the right direction.

“Angry and robust as ever,” he tells me.

“Glad to hear that.”

He sighs. “Anyway, what do you want to know?”

“Just… in general.”

He makes a face as if he was wondering where to start, and that is exactly what I’m looking for: plenty of data, even filtered through his subjective understanding of these creatures.

“They’re ugly things. The stories I’ve heard are always about them attacking ships to drown the men, or luring sailors into the water by singing songs. And this one here… has proven that legend sometimes is right about some things.”

“I remember stories where they’re not evil.” Not many, that’s true, but my favorite one was about a little mermaid who fell in love with the human world and decided to leave her own. A mermaid who instead of killing us wanted to exist within us as part of us.

If I can get the men to leave this place, the mermaid of the lagoon won’t be able to harm them, regardless of the reasons she has to. All I need to know is if it’s worth it, if there’s some shard of humanity in her that might help this along. Will she still want to kill them even if they’ve left?

Buccaneer watches me. I cannot look away from the shape of his quirked eyebrow.

“Would you tell children the truth about the power of winter?” he asks calmly, a true man of the north. “Or is it kinder to just let them believe it’s a lenient force?” He frowns at my silence. “You’re not thinking about doing anything risky and dangerous and _irresponsible,_ right?”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I reassure him. Lying isn’t my strongest suit, but I sure as hell can play along with a half-truth and a morally dubious intent.

“I lost many comrades to that—” I can tell from his hesitation that he’s straining not to say the word ‘bitch’ in front of me. As if my mouth hadn’t spoken worse blasphemy in the past decades. “—monster. I lost an arm. I lost a lot of amazing stories about me losing the arm, because it was lost stupidly. I wouldn’t want you to suffer the same fate.”

“She won’t harm me,” I say, and I’m surprised at the firmness of my tone. I really do believe it, don’t I? And right now I can’t tell if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

He seems to be wondering the same, from the show of his facial expression, contorted in doubt. It could very well still be a trap to lure me in so deeply, in all senses she can, and make a point, show her invulnerability to tempt them.

Maybe that’s what she wants, for the men to retaliate in all their numerical strength and just end her. Mermaids live long, almost forever. How long until they beg for an end?

In these conditions, I would say not long. If they are anything like us humans, she would need company and resources and something to keep the boredom at bay in order to last long in half-decent circumstances. A lifetime of solitude and misery could make anyone go mad.

“Has she tried anything while we were gone?”

I can’t help but blush, because the answer is yes in ways that he cannot ever comprehend. She did try something, and she did succeed, because I've kept returning to the spot where I know she will be. She just hasn’t drowned me yet, left my bones to rot somewhere in the sand.

“Other than ogling from a distance, nope,” I say.

He puts a heavy hand on my shoulder.

“Stop trying to find a way to reason around this, kid. Whatever she is, she’s evil. Only evil kills.”

“Or gods. Or us, for food.”

Buccaneer sighs loudly.

“She doesn’t kill us to live off us, sweetheart. And no god would kill that unmercifully. She despises us. In the tales, they all do.”

“Yes, but—”

In the end, I might have pushed too far. He grows impatient.

“Zinnia, look around you. None of that matters. There’s plenty of towns around the border that will soon have no protein but the one we gather here, because the cattle is dying.”

Shit, I didn’t know that. I’ve seen cows roaming around, and where there’s animals there’s life, but I never knew it was this bad. Although it could only _be,_ all these men don’t all belong to the same town, some come from so far they must have already thought their families and old lives lost.

But this is still idiocy, to stay in a lagoon that’s zealously guarded, tooth and nail.

“Then maybe you could move to another lake, there must be more,” I say. “These mountains cover miles and miles.”

“I’ve scouted the whole border. This is all we have.” Buccaneer looks me in the eye and I notice the wear of the years upon him. His face has never looked old to me, nor weary, but today I truly am seeing the mark of him as man of his age. His eyes stare back at me and they’re full of stories he will never tell out loud. “You asked about my wife… I’m not letting her starve because I want to run from some water witch. We’re the last men standing.”

His gaze returns to the fire in front of him.

“Stories won’t clear anything up,” he tells me a while later in a mutter. Buccaneer hardly ever lowers his voice this much. “Trust me.”

Then, with a sigh and creaking knees, he leaves me alone.

Stories… He knows them, of course he does. And why? Maybe because he tried to do the same thing I am, only on the opposite side of things. He must have tried to get the mermaid out, or at least… neutralize her, see if there was a deal to be agreed upon.

Maybe that’s how he lost the arm… Maybe he got too close. Maybe he lost it when he went back in there again, ready to kill what threatened to kill him first.

In the end, I go back into the water. It’s more homely to me, sometimes, than the sand. Less lonely. And I don’t have to live up to anyone’s ideas of me.

There is no me, here. I become something else entirely. Something I’ve been attuned to all my life yet had never approached like this. I feel like I’m close to the core of my being, the reason for my existence.


	6. A fitting punishment

Days pass, months pass, spring comes. I spend more time on my boat than on land, I watch these men come and go and stay, and I watch them look at me out of the corner of their eye, thinking me mad, thinking me gone already to the power of a sea I can’t see. But I share their fire and their patches of sand and I bring fish when they bring berries and bark and the occasional piece of meat we treasure for as long as we can, so none of them ushers me out, My treason, small as it is, insignificant, doesn’t really lead them to distrust me. To them, I’m just a strange girl on some piece of wood, hoping to catch new reflections on the surface of the waves while they lie to themselves about being safe on shore.

I’m safer in the water. It’s quiet and simple, and the mysteries in it don’t torment me the way they do on land. Sometimes it feels like I’m being pulled underwater, despite my cautions, and now because of my absolute trust.

Some other times, though, I’m absolutely sure I will be, sooner or later. And I don’t mind it, not really. I never really belonged anywhere, what difference does it make to fall here, to stay here, to rest here? It’s just a spot lost in the border of Amestris, as good a cemetery as any other.

I’m not in danger, and I know this.

She comes meet me and I know her teeth can gnash and her nails tear my skin, and I know her lips might kiss and drown me. I’ve heard the tales, I’ve heard Buccaneer’s stories. I should be afraid, but I’m not.

Because her smile isn’t threatening, and her nails hide in the water most of the time. She doesn’t mean to frighten me, she just… wants some company, I guess. Someone to observe and pass the hours with.

And I have those empty hours to fill too, now. It’s what I do.

I leave the heaviest pieces of clothing on shore with the rest of my things and get on board, drag the boat into the water, and climb it to watch the incessant coming and going of the waves.

The weather favors this kind of activity. The sun shines softly on us, and I’m not cold anymore. One of these days, I might even be able to swim with her. Would she kill me, then, when I was totally submerged, lost to my own delusions of trust?

Or would she swim with me until I had to return?

Because I always have to return.

Today the breeze is intent on setting me off-course, and I let it. I just wander, floating on the lagoon. There’s fish anywhere, even after so long. I turn my sight to the shore, to the few men who today have nowhere else to be. Some just returned from seeing their families in the towns scattered around the border, some don’t leave because they have no family to return to. Miles, like me, is always here, unless Buccaneer drags him along to his own hometown.

Then, I get the same feeling I used to when jumping off a tree after climbing, time moves in slow-motion and my gut can’t keep up with it when suddenly the water around me is jolted upwards and the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen jumps upwards with it, graceful and made for this—precisely this.

She arcs herself to enter the water again, and I can see that sly smile of hers as she jumps over my boat. When she hits the water again, the waves destabilize me a little, but I can’t worry about falling.

In a way, I’ve already fallen. Harder than I had expected, and faster than I can register.

“What are you doing?” I say, laughing. Mostly she’s a serene, almost dark creature, but something must have changed today. She’s playing in the lagoon like a child plays with sand.

“Rocking your boat,” I hear her say before she disappears beneath me again.

“ZINNIAAAA!!” the men yell, having seen the ruckus and the splash that has be sitting on deck, breathless. “What’s going on?”

I’m never sure if they’re up to date with what I do here, what I keep concealed behind the hull of this humble floating platform I call boat. I’ve never cared enough to tell them. It’s none of their business. At the end of the day they get what they need and I… play with fire behind their backs, reinforcing their feeling of illusory safety. There’s just something about the danger of getting burnt that makes me want to risk it all even more.

“Just calm down, it’s okay.” I yell back. Then, I turn to the mermaid that’s hiding from me right now. A breath of life for her, this must be. She’s especially unlike herself today. Normally, we dance around each other, a safe distance between us, and just talk. About the sky and the stars she and I see that we don’t know where they lead or which are dead. I’m no scientist and I have no answers for the questions she asks about it, and she can’t tell me either what she knows. She says it’s all in the tales passed down from the oldest generation to the next, and she’s a broken link in the chain. She always looks up when she tells me that, as if the way to get her back to her home was in the sky. Did it rain, I wonder, when she was banished? Did this lagoon emerge from the sky in the form of raindrops at the hand of some really old mermaids, rulers of her fate even now?

She’s gone now, disappeared under the water, because I can’t see her. But I can hear her, all dissimulated giggles somewhere close that light me up inside, very deep inside in some place I can’t put my finger on. Like a tiny sun within. I can’t help but giggle too at the absurdity of this. I’m playing hide and seek with someone that’s older than me and older than the world I know. “Where are you hiding now?”

“Close. I’m always close,” she calls.

I lean on the edge of the boat to finally catch a glimpse of her, pressed against the curved wood, and glancing at me like a cat who didn’t expect to get caught red-handed stealing something from the cabinets.

I lay down on deck to look at her, and I smile. A mermaid who acts like a cat.

“You’re always where you shouldn’t. When I look up, you’re down. When I look down, you’re flying,” I tell her.

“I have no wings.”

“You have a tail to propel yourself out. For a moment there, it looked as if you were indeed flying.”

She smirks at me. “That wouldn’t be a sight your friends might appreciate.”

My friends… the ones who don’t understand, the ones who are right to. Sometimes I forget this woman has murdered in cold blood, even if she has spared me. Why, then, am I so drawn to her smile as if she hadn’t? Haven’t I seen the effects of her? Haven’t I seen Buccaneer and the man he has become through facing her over the years? Miles, and his shattered hope that he would be able to lead a normal life here in the mountains?

I see them all and I know why they stay and persevere and just try to appeal to their human side. Survival of the fittest, isn’t it? The laws of the jungle aren’t fair, but they are still laws, and men live in the illusions of peace those laws create. Order is important, not everyone can live away from society battling against time and survive. People need company and noise and something to do. They don’t like the calm before the storm any more than they like the storm.

“I would,” I tell her. “I would appreciate it, the sun shining through you…” She’d look like an angel, her hands covered in blood that’s not her own, and yet… I like to think perhaps one day she would repent, as she flew, as she saw our human lives crumbling in a dirt that will no longer let the seeds take root in. “You’d look like a rainbow above water.”

There’s this feeling in me, sometimes, that makes me feel exactly like that. Like a rainbow in a rainy day. A feeling that sets me apart from the crowd, from this place. It’s not gray or lonely or dull or scary. It’s full of life, paradoxically. The inanimate objects—rocks, sand, sky—it’s all alive, somehow, when I’m feeling like that. The water keeps flowing, the clouds keep moving, and we keep meeting when we shouldn’t. When was the last time I worried about consorting with this creature right in front of me? When did I last worry about getting caught doing it?

She laughs in that peculiar way she does, like glass clicking against glass, then splashes me before getting lost underwater. I smile to myself as I prepare my nets for the long day ahead of me and watch her tail take her away.

I know, eventually, she will distract me again from the boredom of fishing. From the boredom of killing. A killing I can’t quite think of as such. Not yet, probably not ever. They’re just fish to me. They look like fish. If they looked like her, human in a way and ethereal in another, powerful and terrifying and mythical, then maybe I wouldn’t.

I could never kill a creature like this one. It would be a crime against everything I grew up believing in. Yet I kill her kind when they don’t look like her.

I’m human, after all. My fight for survival comes past this point, and I will go through it if I have to. I will do anything to live another day.

Another day, another cycle of fishing and shooing a mermaid away that deep down I can’t wait to see again on the deck of my boat.

 

*

The mermaid exists in a perpetual state of observing. The bottom of the lagoon, the light that filtered underwater through the surface of the water, and the humans. The humans who weren’t always in the same place, who weren’t always the same people.

One only human remained, her human. The one who gets on that artifice and comes to see her every day—or allows for her to see her every day. The human comes to fish, nothing else. But it makes the mermaid’s day.

She feels her coming, the water change, almost warning her. But it isn’t a real warning, it’s just a heads-up, and it’s … nice. It has already been too many years of rotting away without having anything to live for. She remembered the days when this lagoon was barely enough to contain her size. Now she’s shrunk to a piece of who she used to be, and it is so fitting, to grow smaller as she grows older. Grow until you disappear. Grow until others grow because of your flesh.

The human leaves often without a word, smiling and looking happy, and somehow the mermaid is happy too. She likes this feeling that comes when the human does, as if suddenly the past centuries of solitude hadn’t been as real as this is now.

The human joins the others, sits on the sand, and they talk. The mermaid wonders what they talk about, when she talks to her human, it’s special. She gets to understand the enemy a little better. And she remembers, now, why she didn’t want to kill them in her youth.

Because they are fascinating, distinct, and unpredictable. They had taken over the world without meaning to.

The mermaid wonders about their lives, about where they go when they leave, and why they are only eating the same things over and over again. She wonders who they are and who they wanted to be, she wonders if here is any way a human can change throughout the years, and she still doesn’t understand how those handful of years a human calls a life can ever be enough.

The mermaid doesn’t sleep, watching. She nears the shore at night, when she knows no one will be awake enough to notice her there. She used to do the opposite, once, because she too needed to preserve her energy. But now she has no reason to, they no longer enter her lair with harpoons. They have listened to her human, they let her handle the lagoon.

The humans sleep together still, afraid of her even when she can’t harm them. It is curious, very curious. None of them would survive alone, and they know this. They are smart to acknowledge that weakness instead of denying it.

That is how group animals make it in nature.

That is how a mermaid can hunt a shark, a whale, and not die trying.

The many overpowers the one.

Yet… sometimes the one might also overpower the many. Just once, just for once. All rules have their exception, and the mermaid knows this when she comes closer and closer to the shore, to find her human, to see where she sleeps, where she dreams. _Are human dreams the same as mine? Does she, too, dream of things that haven’t come to happen?_

But as she nears the last inches of water, she can’t find her. It’s all men, huddled together for fake safety and comfort. And she’s gone. But the mermaid stays, getting sand on her hands and the scales on her tail, because the best of humanity lies in the hearts of these people she doesn’t understand, and she wants to understand them.

Why do they stay? Why don’t they move on? Why do they ache to kill yet don’t? Is it done out of fear for her or just… realism, knowing they never will manage that kill?

Then, the blue eyes of the mermaid get accustomed to the greys of the night, the trees rustling in the horizon, and the rocks rolling closer to shield themselves from the breeze. A girl emerges from the darkness, carrying a light within that is not perceptible to the eye, let alone the human eye. No human would have noticed it, because they couldn’t, but the mermaid did, and she was confused as to why. She had forgotten how soothing that light could be, to someone like her. It whispered words of comfort and support, even without sounds. The secret to that light was that it was never alone, there were always more lights around it, as unique and varied and as special.

The mermaid thought her own had come to its end a long time ago, but she sees that light now as well, reflecting on the body of that one human—her human. And her human is coming closer, because she too has seen.

She nears the mermaid and she stays safe on the shore, her feet ever so dry. If only she would get her toes into the water, the human and mermaid would finally share, truly share, this punishment together.

But the mermaid doesn’t want to impose such punishment on someone who, if deserving of one, would deserve an entirely different kind.

“You look smaller like this,” her human says.

“I am,” the mermaid says. “I grow smaller every day.”

“And brighter… somehow. You’re all moonlight right now, you’re casting a shadow on the water.”

The mermaid smiles.

“I’m not entirely sure that is all _me._ ”

Her human looks at her own hands, crosses her legs on the sand and sits down on its moisture.

“You know, for a moment… when I saw you here I thought you might grow legs and walk.”

The mermaid looks at her, waiting for the rest that is surely to come.

“My favorite story when I was a child was the story of a mermaid who grew legs.”

“Was she a good mermaid?”

“Yes.” A truly good mermaid, that one must have been, nothing like this one. No death on her hands, no regrets, just hopes and dreams and the possibility to make them all come true. A tale, after all. In the real world, good mermaids don’t exist. They are a sailor’s worst nightmare made flesh, and this one mermaid is nothing but a saltwater stray.

“Am I?” And this is but a trick question.

Her human holds her gaze, but not for long. Never for long.

“No one here is ‘good’.”

The mermaid smiles sadly. “A fitting answer,” she says. “A fitting truth.”

The light of her human shines on her. If she is moonlight, her human is sunlight. And she is but a reflection of it. The shadow cast on the water isn’t the mermaid’s, not right now. A new birth always shines brighter than a soul wasting away in light.

“But you _are_ good. These men are good, in your own way,” the mermaid continues. What these people are doing they are doing because they think it right. She, on the other hand, has been killing for centuries in order to sate a life-long emptiness that can’t ever be replenished again. “Your sleep isn’t plagued by guilt.”

“What do you know about my sleep?” the human asks softly.

“Nothing,” the mermaid replies. “I came to learn.”

“What do you hope to learn about us?”

“Anything you might be ready to tell me.”

“You know all there is to know,” her human said. “While I… know so little about you. Would you tell me your story? Your _real_ story.”

The mermaid sighs like only eternal creatures can. Every breath out of her lungs is old pain turned wisp.

“If you would listen. If it wouldn’t frighten you.”

Her human gets comfortable on the sand.

And the mermaid looks her in the eye for a moment. She sees light, true, but she also sees tiredness in those dark eyes, and a weight that has no name and many stories, so she retreats a little back into her waters.

“But perhaps not now,” she finally says. “The moon is high. You need your rest.”

And her human smiled sadly.

“Tomorrow?” she asks.

“Soon,” the mermaid reassures her. She has never told this story but to the fish who already knew it. She might really want to tell it, in the end.

*

The next morning she approaches me as always, hands tangled in nets full of fish and algae. “How is it going today, the murder?”

“It’s not murder. They’re not people,” I say softly. But I don’t believe it. Even if they’re not people, it is murder. I kill to eat, the ones I eat are still deaths at my hands.

But she looks at me with those big blue eyes and I know how she feels, she’s letting me take them. She’s letting me commit the same crime she has in the eyes of a human. Sometimes I wish I could stop, when I have already dug my nail into the gills of a fresh catch.

She lets me kill the closest thing she has to company. And I can’t sleep at night wondering why.

_What do you know about my sleep, mermaid? What do you know about my guilt?_

“What do you do?” I ask, feeding her own question back to her, remembering what she promised to tell me. Her story. The story I ache to tell forward, even if it’s not mine. Storytellers, in the end, don’t always tell their own stories, they embellish them or interchange them with others they have heard to make new ones, and there lies their magic. No story is the same, even if at core it is, when it’s told by different people.

“I waste away,” she says. She seems to find it funny.

“No,” I tell her. “What do you do, as a mermaid? What are you all like?” If Buccaneer won’t give me answers—and he really won’t—, I will look for them elsewhere. I will look for them at their origin. Mermaids are evil in stories for a reason, and all those tales I heard about them must have been based on something. Sightings, relationships, dreams.

I’ve realized I don’t want just _any_ stories about who they are as a people, I want hers.

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me.”

“You’re a stubborn creature.”

“I am,” I admit. Because it’s true, and she’s not stubborn like me to fight me about it like the humans might. Humans love to argue, to speak over one another. We die in our own mess.

She begins talking.

“I can only speak about how we were, once. It’s… been a long time since I …” She frowns. I’ve never seen her frown before, it’s not like her. And it’s a powerful feature on her face, dangerous. Dangerous as I’d forgotten she truly was. She tells it to me straight, because there is no point in embellishing this story. It is what it is, and this mermaid isn’t skilled in the art of making sound better. She doesn’t want it to, she wants me to _see—_ because I asked her to let me. “I refused to kill one of you and was sent here to rot with the rest of the traitors.” She gestures around the water she inhabits, and I realize. What I am killing really is mermaids, traitors of the race that have lost all trace of their old selves.

“For eternity?”

 

*

“For however long I last.”

“Don’t you … live forever?” _Or at least a very very long time,_ the eyes of her human say. And oh how the mermaid would like to contradict that hope in her sweet gaze. Living very long still means hers is a life that ends.

The mermaid shakes her head.

“Not me. Not here,” she says. “What I will shrink into, when it’s my time, is what you eat every night by that fire.”

The mermaid sees in the eyes of her human the realization of what she has done by coming here to fish. She is killing old memories of an ancient race, murderous or not. She’s erasing history.

But right now she seems more concerned with something else, something that exists much smaller in the eyes of the mermaid: panic, panic and empathy.

_When was the last time I was gifted with empathy?_

“Then I need to get you out of here, you need to return—” her human rambles on. Her fear is palpable, so is her hurry. Why do they do that, the mermaid wonders? Why do they insist on running so fast, if what’s coming will come regardless, no matter what they might do to stop it?

The mermaid shakes her head slowly. “No human force can return me. Only _they_ can. Only my own people can uncurse me.”

It is a very specific way to put it, but the mermaid had suspected for some time that this lagoon attracted mankind for a reason. It was a fitting punishment for her, to have the only way for peace be through exterminating the ones coming to threaten it. She just craved a home, somewhere. The home that had been taken away from her. Like her principles, like her individuality. Here she was just another fish soon to be roasted in the flames. Another fitting punishment. From water born, dead by water’s only enemy.

“I thought…” the mermaid says. “… It might end, some day. When I killed.”

_But you, a human on a boat, might have done much more, with so much more meaning, than returning me to the place and people who banished me. You have given me the gift of time well-spent._

“It didn’t, did it?” her human muttered. She has forgotten all about fishing. Her net is partially submerged now, and the fish in it are breathing again.

“There is no end of for this except the natural one.” The mermaid smiled. “And I do not doubt that your kind will soon figure that out. Kill or be killed, that is life.”

Soon, she would be a fish they wouldn’t have any trouble killing. She was already shrinking, day by day, slowly, her scales growing closer and closer to her belly button.

“One day, it will be easy for them,” the mermaid finished. “And I will thank them for the kindness of sparing me an indecent death.”

“No,” her human insists. “I can drag you down the mountain on this boat, I can get you to a lake with no fish or to a river, anywhere you’d like. They won’t want you dead there.”

“They will always want me dead, and I will always want them dead. And if there are other traitors after me, that hate will not die when I do. That, too, is nature.”

“Is it nature to talk to me, then?” her human says, quirking her eyebrow. Stubborn, ever so stubborn. “I’m one of them.”

The mermaid nods solemnly.

“And I’m your enemy,” she affirms.

*

 

_Your enemy… your enemy._ Then she would have murdered me, then she would have rotted the way she had been cursed to. But she hasn’t. And I haven’t left. And I won’t.

Because she isn’t.

“You and I, I don’t know what we are, but we’re not enemies.”

 

*

A man awakens at the crack of dawn, tall and broad and dark-skinned, his eyes the color of human blood. The mermaid knows him, he has been standing by those shores longer than most of them, side by side with the tallest man of them all. He has secrets and has burdened losses, and he will not hesitate, and the mermaid knows this when she sees him entering the water for the first time.

And she knows this is not good.

“We have been seen,” she mutters to her human.

“What?” her human says, quickly turning around to see. Her face falls when she sees. Then, she turns back to the mermaid, eyes sad. “Please, don’t harm him. I will handle it,” she begs.

And the mermaid smiles to herself. She hadn’t thought of harming that human, she is tired and she no longer has the energy. All the strength she has, she reserves for moments like this one, so her words will not falter and her arms won’t fail to dig her sword up from the bottom of the lake.

She smiles because she knows an ending when she sees one. And she smiles because crying would feel like defeat. Better to go into the unknown with her spirits high than sink into it like she has done time and time again before.

She has been witness to the light that shines on the water and makes it resemble the night sky. What else would she need? This has already been a miracle. She should be happy with this, this should suffice.

Then why doesn’t it?

“I need to go,” her human says, hurriedly. “I’m sorry.”

She rows away towards the shore. And the mermaid will not follow.

She watches from a distance how the man stands in her human’s way, his words calculated and precise and poisoned with human rage as she isn’t allowed to either enter the water again or walk on the sand.

How sad, and how fitting. A girl between two worlds, torn on her way to belong to one. The one she’s forced to fit into.

“So this is how it ends,” the mermaid speaks to herself, “the taste of life I did not hope was ever coming…”

_My taste of life._

A woman being yelled at in the distance, alone and cornered. For betrayal. _They have seen us at last,_ the mermaid thinks, _and they know what it means_. It was only a matter of time. It was only a matter of… time.

And now the calm waters would soon be full of wrath again, as it should be. The calm precedes the storm in an endless circle of water. Water returns to water, water moves water. Water prevails. Always.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And the [edit](https://twitter.com/fic_flower/status/1075801676123115522) of this week is... *insert smirk* 
> 
>  
> 
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> 
> (two more weeks and this fic is over and we're back to the usual posting schedule for Adversity ^^)


	7. A goodbye of a different kind

Buccaneer waits for me ashore. For once, I’m scared of what he might do to me. His power was always evident, always a kind energy. Now it’s the storm you can’t either stop or hide from.

“You’ve been consorting with that bitch!” he bellows. The men who think like him hide behind him.

I cross my arms and don’t bulge. What I’ve been doing is none of their business. Why I’m here—the real reason why, not the physical one—is none of their business, and they will never hear it from me.

“I’ve been keeping her away from you,” I correct him. “You made me a deal. And I kept my end of it. You have your fish, every morning. There was never a written rule about not approaching her. She was a threat to _you,_ not to me,”

And I’d never thought the distinction was ever so clear, but as it turns out it is. It is clear in the face he makes at me, torn between rage and loss. An arm and his people. But he shakes it out quickly, because experience has taught him not to cling to sorrow too much in case it weights heavy enough to drag you down to the bottom of a lake.

“What lies has she told you?” he asks. “What does she want?”

_Things I can’t tell you, because not even I know them. All I know is that she’s as guilty as you, and that she’s deserving of the life you too crave._

“She wants to be left alone,” I finally tell him—them, the pairs of eyes judging me as we all judge a foreigner the first time we see them. “She wants to die alone, here. And you keep disrupting her peace.”

That only adds fuel to his anger. And it makes sense for it to. If all she wants is peace, why did she start a war?

“We’re starving! Maybe we should just starve to death, to let her die in peace, huh?” Buccaneer mocks me, and the men laugh, unsure, behind him. “Mermaids don’t even _die._ ”

But this one does, and she longs for it, for her end. She’s lived alone for too long, hiding, being a monster. She wants peace. Just like we all do. Peace before life takes us away, be it through hunger or pain or the cruel passage of time.

“No, I’m not saying that, I just…”

“Listen,” Buccaneer says, “I’m old and I’m tired. You either stay and live by our rules, like one of us, or you leave. We managed before you, we can do that again.” And there is real sorrow in his eyes when he says that. I know he likes me, despite me not being part of his group. He knows I’ve worked hard and without a complaint, and he knows I’m not indifferent. But I expected it would still hurt him, this conversation.

And it hurts both ways. Because he’s asking me to leave permanently, to go back to roaming hungry and alone. So very, very alone. What is it to them, if they’re stripping me of the last shreds of company I have found?

“You can’t stay here and let her eat your brain,” he continues, softer now. There’s a few more sad faces in the crowd. I see Austin trying to hide from me, so I won’t see that he sympathizes with the cause as well as with me, and that he can’t ever choose sides. “I can’t let you, you’re so young, you have so many years ahead of you that you can’t waste here.”

“She’s not eating anything of mine. I’m perfectly sound of mind.” I sigh. It’s useless to explain what even I find hard to comprehend. “But I understand. I accept your terms, I just… need to go back there again one last time.”

Buccaneer laughs. “To say goodbye? To a killer?”

As a matter of fact, yes, I plan to. It’s the least thing I deserve, to be able to explain myself to her and apologize. Let this go gently, let it go kindly, and appreciate it for what it was. A breath of life—for the both of us.

I’ve always liked mysteries, and I thought I might get to unveil this one. When maybe it was been the mystery itself which has unveiled me. And now that I meet the end of its storyline, it remains a mystery, for the next person to come around to be interested in.

I just raise an eyebrow at Buccaneer. “Do you want your dinner served as always or don’t you?”

He grumbles at first, but he lets me. They have grown dependent on what I do on that boat. That boat called freedom that I board back with a pounding heart. Is it the last time I’m doing so? Is it, truly?

When was the first? And was I as terrified of what would happen as I am now?

Maybe it was a different type of fear. This fear is … endless, desperate as nothing else can be.

Because the water is so calm, it takes me a long while to sail forward. I can feel the eyes on the back of my neck, expecting me to be quick, to fail and come back and let everything go back to normal.

But I don’t fail. I go right where I want to be.

A core of water, not solid and not liquid, and barely even existing. A presence, if anything.

My mermaid emerges like she always does, and she lifts her dripping arm from beneath to reach out to me. I just lean in, belly on the boat, chest hovering in the air. Even if they’re watching, even if I risk falling in and dying or being killed.

_Touch me,_ I beg her. _Touch me because now I don’t want the alternative. I want the whole of you._

Her hand isn’t cold at touch when she cups my face and smiles. It’s not warm either, not like the sun or a summer day. But it’s not cold either. It’s that sort of touch that merges directly with your own, not distinct but separate anyway.

I close my eyes and lean closer to her palm.

I can’t leave this lagoon. I can’t ever leave it, I will starve, these men will starve, and she will die of sadness. I know this, but I can’t stay either and watch her die day after day as I grow thinner and she grows smaller.

She lingers on my cheek, her thumb stroking my cheekbone.

I open my eyes at last. I want to see her as she does that. I want to see the humanity that’s not even part of her genetic composition staring back at me.

I remember what we spoke about, our own cultures and races, and how little we understood, how little she understood us even if she’d heard about us.

“One thing you don’t know about humans,” I whisper to her, very very close, “is that we’re our own enemies, blind and stubborn.”

“So I’ve noticed.” She smiles at me. Maybe she feels it, before I even have to tell her what is happening. “Have you been asked to leave?”

“Yes.” I tell her honestly. And it’s funny how one little word like ‘yes’ can convey how little I want to leave her. I don’t know what I could occupy my days with, what activity could replete me as much as sailing alongside with her has, as being guilty with her has.

“And will you?” she asks again.

It is more than just a question, it’s a plea.

“If I do, they will go hungry. If I stay, I can’t see you anymore. Our own enemies…” I return her smile, but mine is nowhere near as gentle as hers. Mine is gritty and sad and I’m already close to tears as it is. My enemies, my peers, all waiting for me in the sand. And I don’t want to go back to them, but I will die here, on the waves, if I don’t.

I can’t die here. I just wanted to live. That was the whole point of this, living one more day, knowing one more thing, feeling one more pang of something in my chest that I repressed until it came back to me.

“Betraying one’s entire race isn’t wise,” she says. And she would know, wouldn’t she?

_Oh, you lonely, lonely soul… But you betrayed them out of principles. And you fell far from them here. Isn’t that what being human is? Falling, not always growing._

“No,” I tell her. I can’t survive alone out there for as long as I’d like. But I won’t be able to stay here for much longer, either. Seeing her, calling for me without words, attacking the men I share a shelter with… it would break my heart a little more every day until there was no heart left to break.

The mermaid moves her hand away back into the water that clings so beautifully to her skin.

 “Is this goodbye, then?”

And, suddenly, I don’t need to think about options. Leaving, staying, dying, living.

All at once can be had. All at once. A real goodbye, like she says, just not the one she expects.

_All I want is a memory of you as this, as something I could grow to love._

“No,” I answer firmly. “It’s not goodbye. Not for us, anyway. For them.”

“Don’t…” she tries to convince me. And if she wasn’t so stoic, then I might even think she’s holding back tears. What’s a tear to an ocean? “Don’t make my same mistakes.”

I smile a little, and I do shed tears of my own.

What are my tears, to her?

“It’s not in your hands...” I mutter.

She suddenly rises, leaning two strong arms on my boat and forcing me to move back a little so she has space. Now it’s my legs that dangle over the precipice.

“I could stop you,” she whispers, barely inches away from my face. I can feel her breath, salty and wet and cool. “I could grab you by your neck and hold you down until you drown. I could… fulfill my destiny, the part of me that still wants to.”

“Then do. I will not stop you,” I say softly, almost lovingly. If she does, then it’s over. And it’s out of my control.

Lovingly, too, she replies: “I will not kill you. You know this.”

“I do.”

She doesn’t leave my side, as I do what the men need me to, what I promised I would and will never fail in doing. She grabs onto my boat as I move it away, and her eyes are sad when I meet them. Sad that I leave an inch at a time. Sad that I will bring her own kind, old and wasted away, down with me. Sad that she can’t come, too.

This _is_ the last time. Because I know she will not harm me, and she will not near me when I come back here again, ready to keep on fishing in the name of the human race.

A goodbye of a different kind. Our goodbye. Bittersweet and painful as all goodbyes are.

_At least_ , I think, _we will still see each other, however far, however briefly._

She smiles at me when she catches me looking. And I will always remember that smile whenever I look at the sun set in the reflection on the water, as I hope she breaches it to see the sunset in my eyes as well.

These few minutes of bliss… it’s almost like a tale, the middle of it, torn between beginning and end. But all things end, and eventually I will have to sail away, back to where I should belong.

 

*

The mermaid weeps in silence, her human cradles her hands in her own.

Dusk has fallen, death is falling upon them. Time is up. _Goodbye, my human. Goodbye._

“Thank you,” the mermaid says to her.

And her human shakes her head. There are tears in her eyes, too.

“I forgive you,” her human says. “For what you did. You have a second chance now.”

“I will not forget you,” the mermaid almost sings. “I will not let the memory of you be overthrown by my thirst for revenge.”

“We’ll both be here, apart but here,” her human tells her. “Will that be enough?”

“It’s more than I could ask,” the mermaid says. “It’s more than I deserve.”

And her human leans in again, softly presses her own forehead against the mermaid’s.

_Goodbye, my little human. Goodbye._

They would grow old on either sides of reality. A mermaid without legs to walk ashore, a human without lungs that can breathe underwater. Both look at each other in the distance, neither forgetting.

_Goodbye…_

It is the mermaid who swims away. After all, she has had centuries to prepare for goodbye.

*

They didn’t doubt my word or my intentions this time around. Buccaneer offers me silence and fish I have caught with my two own hands, but I refuse to eat it. I just want silence. There is a song within me that aches to be sung, not in words, not even in proper sounds, just… a song within. And I can’t open my mouth and let it out.

Is this how mermaids mourn their dead? Or don’t they?

Is this how my mermaid mourned the family I took away from her?

It feels right, to do it this way. I’m not just mourning a human. I’m mourning eternity itself. A wasted chance at it.

Mine or hers, I do not know.

Slowly, everyone else goes to bed. Buccaneer puts a hand on my shoulder, as if he meant to sympathize with me in such difficult times. He doesn’t, not really, and I don’t want him to. He is who he is, and he is human. He can’t mourn what isn’t human. He can’t mourn something as complex as this.

I hear him snore after a while. They have all finally fallen asleep.

I sit here by the fire and I let the heat take me away. It’s unnecessary heat, since spring is here already, but it gives them a sense of home, I guess. After a while, I’m tired too, so I just put it out safely, and walk to the shore.

I take my boots off, so the water can lick at my feet, without any danger of getting caught, without any fear at all. It’s a little cold, but that only wakes me up more and more as seconds pass.

I want to be awake. I want to watch the end of this with my two own eyes as the sun rises at dawn. A dawn and an ending. So ridiculous…

I want to give this lagoon my goodbye. A real goodbye. One I won’t have to struggle to remember years from now.

I take off my pants, too, and I wade in. A little, just a little. Just at first. The water clings to my shins and then the skin behind my knees, and my thighs, and my hips. And then I take my t-shirt off too, and I throw it to the shore where the rest of my clothes are.

There is no moonlight tonight. I’m alone in the dark. And it feels freeing.

For a moment, I could almost pretend this is the ocean and I am about to venture in it for the first time. And if it’s the first time, I want to do this right.

_The sort of goodbye I won’t have trouble remembering…_

I take off my underwear as well and flinch at the coldness of the water until I get used to how it feels.

I keep walking until my feet can’t touch the rocky bottom, then I swim to the center of the lagoon. My home. My core as well as my mermaid’s.

And I dive.

And I see it. The bones through the clear water, down at the bottom, piled up without care of order in a moonless night. Death. So much death it makes me want to cry. And I shouldn’t be able to, not here, not without a breath to let out.

But I do let it out. A breath underwater.

And then, naturally as if this happened every day, a breath _in._

I try to move, to swim upwards and breathe the way I should be, and when I try to kick with both feet, I realize I no longer have two.

I no longer have legs to move me closer to the surface.

A tail the color of sunset has replaced them. Shaking, my hand passed over the little scales. I have scales, little half-moons that protrude from the skin of the tail, rough at touch yet gentle, like rubbing your cheek against someone’s short beard.

I know I’m not dreaming, my dreams are never this linear. In my dreams, I’m never this naked. I wear no clothing now, it’s all being licked by the lagoon, and I wade deeper into it. The bones of the dead pile up, and the fish steer away from them. They aren’t all small, some of these fish lay at the bottom, lost or scared or maybe both, and they still stay together.

They must be young enough to still remember who the rest of them are. How many traitors live in these waters. The thought of it terrifies me. These… these are my kin now, I am like they once used to. Will they look down at me for it?

I’m an aberration to them, a human with a tail. A human trespassing so deep, so far, that death might be awaiting by the hands of a mermaid with a sword, and I will never know until my end comes to meet me.

Until she comes.

Where is she, where is the one I was so reticent to leave?

Where is my mermaid, whose name I don’t know?

She’s always been _the_ mermaid, I guess now she will need that name, since there’s two of us.

I keep swimming for a long time, or maybe time just passes more slowly underwater, until I find her true lair, a tiny cave with a tiny entrance I have to squeeze to get through.

_This is where she’ll die,_ I think. Where we both will. A prison. Her prison, my home.

Life is cruel, it takes away all human source of food and it cages her here, and gives me the feeling I’d been chasing all my life since I was born. Have I been carrying this within me for almost thirty years, just waiting to meet the one whose influence would finally drive me far enough away from humanity?

There’s a small pocket of air within this cave, and she sits by it, holding her sword in her hands. She doesn’t notice me, why would she? But I watch her sigh and clasp that metal like her life depended on it. I’d never seen the sword before, even if I knew of it. It’s the last tie she has to her people, aside from the fish who remind her of her own fate. Does she clutch it in the hope it will be over now that she has sacrificed more humans than she can count, now that she has learned what it is to be one? Does she clutch it in hope for death, the final goodbye?

I hope for her. I wanted to taste her waters before I left her forever, now I’m not leaving but the humans ashore. The human life. I look at her and I know, I just know I was never human. I was always looking, always struggling to find her. And she … she was right here for me to find, in the heart of the coldest place in Amestris. A truly cold monster lived here once, she has changed. She pardoned Miles’s life.

_And she pardoned mine, too_ , I remember. Did she know? Did she know without knowing?

I flap my tail and move closer until she sees me, and her eyes… diamond and sky all together, open wide when they settle on me. My bareness, my changes. My choice.

I see it, too, through her eyes. And I remember the tale of a mermaid who was a human, who lived and died in the human world, leaving everything else she knew behind for the sake of pursuing human knowledge. This is the reverse tale, a human turned mermaid.

She leaves the sword against the rock of the cave and approaches me.

“Your legs…” she says, and somehow I can hear her. Distorted and distant, but there. So very much there, with no one to interrupt us, with nothing else to focus on. Just a voice underwater and eyes that entrance me to the bottom of my being. She calls. She looks at me and she calls me. “They are…”

“Gone,” I finish.

“How?” she asks me, curious and prudent at the same time. Legs don’t just disappear.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I was planning on asking you. I figured you might be the bigger expert.”

She doesn’t even take the time to take the compliment, and she just observes me.

“I have heard stories, but… I had never seen this happen.”

Stories… Stories that aren’t quite like this one, but that may give it a sense, after all. If she is as old as I think she is, she might even know the name of that mermaid who left.

“I’ve heard them too. They must be true.” What else but true? The universe is cruel when it decides who it wants to instill differentness in.

The mermaid takes my hand, rubs her thumb over the back of it as if it contained the secrets I’ve asked her about.

“Who birthed you?” she says.

“My mum. A—a human,” I reply. And I remember her, angry and opinionated and dedicated to keeping the family business alive until she couldn’t. Until _no one_ could. But she will always blame me for leaving before that happened.

“No,” the mermaid says, “who birthed you as this?”

She puts a hand to my heart, fingers against my sternum. And I want to melt against that. It’s where I belong, in the space between our skins coming closer and closer together.

But she has asked a question: who birthed me as this? I haven’t been born, I’ve just… changed, from one breath to the next. When I closed my eyes, once into the water. When I realized I didn’t want to leave her.

“My… my choice, I think,” I stutter. “I wasn’t going to make it. It’s not fair. You have killed, they have killed. And I never belonged here.”

And she looks at me with new emotions in her face. Understanding, recognition, and maybe… a hint of something else, something I can’t quite put my finger on, something I can’t name but can _feel,_ deep in my bones, deep beneath the sternum she’s touching.

I touch her hand with my own and she smiles.

“Except you did,” she tells me. “You do belong. You’re just a different kind of ordinary.”


	8. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy New Year :D

“And so many years later, the rains came. In downpours and storms and hurricanes. They flooded the last remaining survivable patches of land on earth, and whatever humans remained lived through it in secret. But as the water levels rose, the little blue lagoon overspilled and overspilled and overspilled until it formed a river that covered the entire valley and eventually met the ocean on the other side of the continent. The mermaids, led by the new currents and winds, swam for years and decades, one growing slightly smaller in size as time went by, until they reached it: the ocean. The unexplored, dark, powerful ocean—parent to them both—welcomed them in like the long-lost children they were and restored the cursed mermaid’s natural size and abilities. The younger mermaid, now significantly smaller than her partner, for she was still growing, held her hand and, at last, together they ventured into all that new shade of blue.”

The mother closed the book she’d been reading.

“Mum, d’you think I’ll turn into a mermaid too when I fall in love with a girl?” her daughter asked. She was at that tender age when these questions seemed so very natural to her, and her mother wouldn’t dream of letting her down by confessing that this was just another tale of many and that no one knew if mermaids existed or not.

The mother giggled. “I hope not, I’d hardly ever see you.”

“They’re really cool, mermaids. But this one… is evil at first. It’s sad.”

“Well, … sometimes we make mistakes. We can all be bad at some point, what matters is that we learn about it to become better. So it doesn’t always have to be sad.”

She booped her daughter’s nose with the tip of her index finger. It made the little girl smile so wide, it was always worth it.

“I like her anyway,” she said, sinking just a little bit deeper into the bed covers. “Maybe she will be good one day, wherever she is now with her girlfriend. Maybe she is _better._ Other mermaids are, she’ll get it.”

The mother smiled.

“She’s the exception to the norm, eh?”

“That’s why I like it, mum.” the little girl says. “It’s the only _different_ story. The rest are all about… palaces under the sea and handsome princes. And that’s pretty and everything, but… an evil mermaid with a girlfriend!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this is the end of my little Mermaid AU - now as of next week I'll go back to posting the main fic (and gushing about it like a proper fangirl).
> 
> I made a [thread](https://twitter.com/fic_flower/status/1065561890242404353)on Twitter where you can see all the humble edits I started doing while writing this story, including the one I posted today. And since I've made a few new ones over the months I might add some of them in the future, too.
> 
> I hope you're having a really nice beginning of 2019, and thank you for reading me <3

**Author's Note:**

> Expect many Little Mermaid references from now on XD
> 
> For the "worldbuilding" in this, I sort of did a bit of background check on mermaids and then went wild because I also liked some stuff from the siren folklore—and I came across some really nice artwork as well when looking for the exact area a mermaid tail covers:
> 
> [The Land Baby](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/John_Collier_-_The_Land_Baby.jpg) by John Collier (1899)  
> [A Mermaid](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/55/John_William_Waterhouse_A_Mermaid.jpg) by John William Waterhouse (1900)  
> [The Fisherman and the Syren](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Leighton-The_Fisherman_and_the_Syren-c._1856-1858.jpg) by Frederic Leighton, c. 1856–1858
> 
> I also will be posting on [my Twitter](https://twitter.com/fic_flower?lang=en) a few of the edits I did on Photoshop, which in a way were the main catalyst for the main idea of this story.


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